Tuesday, March 5, 2013

I have, to my dismay, discovered
that being a paranoid, angry, cynical, Austrian School economist and all-around
lunatic raving gold-bug whack-o slacker, who is absolutely sure that We're
Freaking Doomed (WFD), is an occupation that does not have that certain
glorious glamour and commanding cache to elicit the fawning adoration of hot
chicks ("Take me, Hot Mogambo Poet (HMP)! Bend me over something and let
'er rip!") that would certainly brighten up my admittedly bleak days
expecting, as you learned earlier in this paragraph, doom.

So I am thinking of becoming a
famous and influential poet.To
establish my impressive credentials, here, for your pleasure, is my first poem:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Gold and silver are such
screaming bargains because the evil, foul Federal Reserve is creating So
Freaking Much (SFM) currency and credit in some nightmarish flood of insane
monetary inflation that if you aren't buying them,

Then something is very, very
wrong with you.

Well, I am sure that you, like
poetry lovers everywhere, instantly recognize this as the absolutely best poem
ever written in English, as it is the only poem that tells you how to get
stinking rich by doing nothing except, as the poem makes abundantly clear,
buying gold and silver to capitalize on the suicidal idiocy of the Federal
Reserve creating so much currency and credit to fund the insane
deficit-spending of the corrupt Congress that must, by mathematical necessity,
bankrupt the whole country and cause ruinous inflation in prices, which is more
precisely defined by us professional economists as The Big Crapola (TBC).

Other poems are but clever
and/or melodious trifles, toying with your emotions.

But here, from the Mighty Pen Of
The Mogambo (MPOTM), comes a powerful poem of such sublime rhyme, meter of a strange
sort and, if you look hard enough and really use your imagination, actual
alliteration, brilliantly combined with a sure-fire Path To Extreme Riches
(PTER), as guaranteed by 2,500 years of history

Now, please notice that I used
the word "currency" instead of "money."I did this for two important, but completely
different, reasons.

One reason is, by virtue of my newly-found
chick-magnet status of being the Best Poet Who Ever Lived (BPWEL),
"currency" is poetically alliterative with "creating" and
"credit" which is a literary technique us big-time poets use all the
time.

The other reason is because, as
Mike Maloney of goldsilver.com pleasantly pointed out to me, it is an important
fact that I never thought about, namely fiat dollars are NOT "money."

This is a fascinating fact I
learned when I casually stopped by his office and politely asked for him to
loan me some money because I could use a few bucks since it was almost
lunchtime and I was hungry, but if I went home to eat, my wife would ask me
where I was all morning, and I'd say I was at the driving range like I always
am, damn it, and then I'd get some static about what a low-life, lazy bastard I
am.

And if I used my own money to
eat lunch, then I wouldn't have enough left over to get another bucket of balls
to hit at the driving range, to while away the afternoon so I wouldn't have to
go home and hear what a low-life lazy bastard I am.

So you can see my dilemma.

I'll never forget what he said.
First, he picked up the phone and said "Ask Security to send some people
to my office, please."

Then he turned to me and, with a
smile, said "Fiat dollars are not money. They are currency."

While we were waiting for the
Security people get up to his office, I learned that he is quite the educator,
and he pleasantly explained that while pieces of paper printed with pretty
pictures can be used as a medium of exchange and as a unit of account, two
important functions of money, they are not intrinsically valuable (another
feature of real money), nor are they a store of value, which is one of THE really
necessary things to be "money."

When he saw that I was soon
pretty confused, as I usually get when learning new stuff, he finally sighed
and said "I won't give you any money, but I will give you some currency.
How much would it take to make you leave and never come back?"

I said "Two
bucks!"He said "Fine. Here's
two currency dollars," and then I left, and I passed the Security guy in
the hall ("Hello, Carl!""Go to hell, Mogambo.")

Thinking about it, I see that
this "fiat dollars are not money because they are not a store of
value" fact is made magnificently manifest by noting that at one time,
when I was a kid, a dollar could buy a quite few yummy candy bars, each a
delightful, delicious ambrosia of chocolate, caramel, nuts, sugar out the
wazoo, artificial colors and various preservatives.

But today, with that same dollar,
you can buy only one candy bar. If that!

So the lesson is: Fiat dollars
are not a store of value.

This can be made abundantly
clear of you think back, way back, to when you were a kid, and you were in bed
at night, awake, silently seething with anger about something, and you made
plans, lots of plans, dark, nefarious plans.

Perhaps one of them was "I
am going to hang on to the next dollar I get, so that in the future when, one
dark day of adulthood and I have had it up to freaking here with my whining
wife, and my crazy, juvenile-delinquent kids, and some stupid butt-head boss
who does not recognize my genius but who is instead always yelling at me about
my getting to work 'on time', or not sleeping on the job. or ducking out early,
or something, then I can take that dollar, go down to the store, and buy a
handful of candy bars, eat them all at one time, cramming my mouth completely
full, and get completely buzzed out of my mind on the sugar-high, blissfully
forgetting my problems for a couple of hours. Yeah! That's what I'll do!"

And so, how did the plan work
out? I'll tell you how. You have that one lousy dollar, to buy one lousy candy
bar, and get one lousy, low-grade sugar-buzz for, what? A lousy half hour?

Anyway, I see I got off the
subject by a long shot, when what I wanted you to know, in case you were
pooh-poohing my terrific poem, is that it has apparently already had an effect,
as we learn from a Bloomberg.com news item that China, perhaps inspired by my
poem that gold is a store of value, is using their vast hoard of not-a-store-of-value
fiat currencies to buy gold hand-over-fist, as implied by "gold imports
from Hong Kong jumped by 94 per cent to 834.5 tonnes in 2012 with a monthly
record of 114.4 tonnes in December."

According to numbersleuth.org,
about 165,000 metric tons of gold have been mined in history.

This means that last year the
Chinese bought one-half of one percent of all the gold mined in all of history,
and judging by the exponential trajectory of their increasing imports of gold,
it won’t be long until they have most of it!

Perhaps in that vein, as I don't know if the
Chinese are involved in this, too, but Goldreport.com looked at the
"delivery requests on the COMEX for the month of February, we see that
they are reaching the astronomical amount of 43.26 tons of physical gold, or 1,391,000 ounces of gold to deliver."

To make sure we realize the
significance of this, as I surely didn't, they go on that "since the
‘70s, it’s the first time that there is such a request for physical gold
delivery from the COMEX."

It's as if everybody has suddenly
heard and heeded the poet of the ages (me!), and are buying gold and silver at
a feverish clip!

I don't know if they are saying to themselves
"Whee! This investing stuff is easy!" when they do, but they (as we
poets would say) should, and could, and probably would if they knew they
should!

About Me

The Mogambo Guru
Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications. For podcasts featuring the Mogambo.